<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<title>About</title>
</head>
<body>
<h2>A long time ago...</h2>
<p>In the beginning, there was <tt>IT</tt>.  <tt>IT</tt> was <em>nice</em> and <tt>IT</tt> was the name suggested by Andr&eacute; Roberge's 13 year old daughter Evelyne after he showed her and explained to her that <tt>IT</tt> was designed to produce <tt>I</tt>nteractive Python <tt>T</tt>utorials.
However, <tt>IT</tt> was found to be slightly uninspiring as a name.  After asking on 
the edu-sig list for potential names, <tt>IT</tt> became Crunchy Frog. Crunchy Frog (it probably was more of a Tadpole back then) grew slowly
until  Johannes Woolard joined as a developper, thanks to Google's financial support during the Summer of Code 2006.  As the Frog matured and another project was found with the same name, natural selection took its course and, as of version 0.7, this project was renamed "Crunchy".</p>

<blockquote><i>We use only the finest baby frogs, dew-picked and flown from Iraq, cleansed in the finest quality spring water, lightly killed, and then sealed in a succulent Swiss quintuple smooth treble cream milk chocolate envelope, and lovingly frosted with glucose.</i><br />
<small>From the Monty Python Crunchy Frog sketch.</small></blockquote>
<br/>
<p>Crunchy Frog only uses the finest computer language 
(<a href="http://www.python.org">Python</a>) to process html pages (cleansed by the finest htmlTidy program) to which eye-pleasing styling options are added with a sprinkle of javascript for added interactivity; 
all code is carefully crafted from both sides of the Atlantic, with the goal
of transforming your reading of Python related tutorials into splendidly
entertaining interactive sessions within a Gecko based browser, thanks to the light addition of VLAM. 
</p>

<h3>VLAM</h3>
<p>To accomplish its magic, Crunchy uses VLAM.  If you think you know what VLAM stands for, and you haven't read this tutorial before, I would bet that you are wrong.  This is because VLAM is an acronym that I made up.  It stands for Very Little Additional Markup.</p>
<p>The basic idea that motivated VLAM was to make it as easy as possible to 
transform traditional web-based tutorials into Crunchy tutorials, without 
changing the way that the same tutorials appeared when viewed in a normal 
browser without Crunchy doing its magic. <small>(You may have to read the previous sentence more than once as it is admittedly too long.)</small> </p>
<blockquote><i> - Well, the Superintendent thought it was an almond whirl. People won't expect there to be a frog in there. They're bound to think it's some sort of mock frog.<br />
- Mock frog? We use no artificial preservatives or additives of any kind!</i><br />
<small>From the Monty Python Crunchy Frog sketch.</small></blockquote>
<p>As of version 0.6, all VLAMed files are only using W3C compliant markup elements; and all processed VLAM files, served by Crunchy, remain W3C compliant (if they were at the beginning). [<small>One exception is the  
page used by Crunchy Frog to load local tutorials through a special html form.]</small></p>

<p>To find out more about the various VLAM keywords, you can use the following link:<a href="vlam_summary.html">VLAM</a></p>
<p>That's it ... at least for now.  In terms of basic functionality,
most of what is planned for the 1.0 release is already included.</p>
<p>Future explorations will include:</p>
<ul>
<li>The ultimate goal (post-1.0) will be to transform RUR-PLE as a Crunchy tutorial; more mundane goals are among the following.</li>
<li>Adapting Crunchy so that it can be used with languages other
than English.</li>
<li>Spread the word about creating Crunchy compatible tutorials on web sites of other Python projects.  At the moment, there is a version of
this tutorial on the web, that can be interacted with by using Crunchy
and your favourite browser.  One possible extension of this work would be to, one day, have the ability to point Crunchy at the official Python tutorial site
(which would have been VLAMed by the proper authorities) and go through the
tutorial in an interactive mode.  We've included two "semi-official" 
Python tutorials as a demonstration; you can find them from Tutorial menu.</li>
<li>Taking advantage of Brett Cannon's Ph.D. thesis when he has finished finding a way to sandbox a Python interpreter and integrate his idea within Crunchy, thereby stealing all the glory.</li>
<li>... And many more ...</li>
</ul>
<p>Finally ... please let us (Andr&eacute; Roberge, Johannes Woolard) know
what you think either by posting your impressions on edu-sig or emailing us
directly [andre.roberge@gmail.com or johannes.wollard@gmail.com (sic)].  
Whenever you read "I" in these document, it refers to Andr&eacute; who
started this project.  All the "I"s should soon become "we" to recognize
the extraordinary contribution of Johannes. Johannes would like to acknowledge the financial support from Google, during
the Summer of Code 2006.</p>


</body>
</html>
